July 28, 2016

"California Votes 2016: An Analysis of the Competing Death Penalty Ballot Initiatives."

The title of this post is the title of this lengthy report recently published by the Alarcón Advocacy Center at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles and co-authored by Professor Paula Mitchell, executive director of the Alarcón Advocacy Center, and Nancy Haydt, Board of Governors, California Attorneys for Criminal Justice. The perspective on whether to end or mend the California death penalty is somewhat predictable based on the past work of the authors, and this overview from the document itself provides a summary of its analysis:

California voters will decide the fate of the state’s death penalty this November. There is now a broad consensus that California’s death penalty system is broken. Voters will be asked to choose between two starkly different proposals to address its dysfunction and failures. Competing ballot initiatives will ask voters either to replace the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole, or to double down on the failed system by spending millions more to modify and expand it.

Voters can either support YES on Prop 62, which will replace the death penalty with life without parole and save the state $150 million per year. Or, voters can support Prop 66 to keep the death penalty system and implement multiple changes to how it operates. Each proposition would make substantial and far reaching changes to California’s criminal justice system. But only one can pass into law: if both propositions receive more than 50% of the vote, then the one with most votes will become law and the other will not.

This Report analyzes the competing initiatives. It looks at the current state of the death penalty system in California and analyzes how each initiative will work in practice. In particular it looks at whether the initiatives will achieve their stated goals, and whether there would be other, perhaps unintended, consequences to their passage into law.

This Report concludes that Prop 66’s proposed “fixes” to the current system will cost millions more than the already expensive death penalty system and will not speed up executions. In fact, Prop 66 will only make matters worse by creating more delays and further clogging the state’s over-burdened court system. Prop 66 will add layers of appeals to a system already facing an insurmountable backlog of decades of death penalty appeals waiting to be decided.

Prop 66 contains other provisions that proponents claim will speed up executions, such as keeping the lethal injection protocols secret and out of the public’s purview, exempting them from the Administrative Procedures Act. This and other key features of Prop 66 will certainly be subject to litigation challenging the provisions on constitutional and other grounds, should Prop 66 pass, adding yet more delays to death penalty cases.

The Report further finds that Prop 66 fails to make the constitutional changes required to deliver the results it promises. At the same time, its proposals are so convoluted that they are likely to create many new problems that will not only complicate the administration of the death penalty system, but will also impact and harm the rest of California’s legal system.

This Report finds that Prop 62, by contrast, is straightforward and transparent. It replaces the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole, saving the state $1.5 billion in the next ten years alone. Prop 62 requires inmates to work and increases the victim compensation rate. Prop 62 ensures that the state never executes an innocent person, without jeopardizing public safety.